Sophie Friedländer

In 1989 a commemoration took place in London of the 50th anniversary of the Kindertransport, the operation that enabled 10,000 German-Jewish children to travel to Britain in the wake of Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom of November 9 1938. In those days, Sophie Friedländer, who has died aged 101, was herself a recent arrival as a refugee from Germany.

Having offered her services to the Kindertransport, Sophie had been made second in command at the reception camp at Dovercourt Bay, near Harwich. The traumatised children who arrived there needed psychological as well as normal care, which Sophie - who possessed extraordinary enlightenment and radiance as a teacher - was able to give.

Fifty years on, in the wake of that commemoration - itself organised by Bertha Leverton, one of the Kindertransport children - a film was made for the north German broadcasting organisation, Norddeutscher Rundfunk. This showed Sophie and her lifelong friend Hilde Jarecki (obituary, June 9 1995) in Golders Green, north London - where they lived - Berlin, and in the village of Caputh, near Potsdam.

Sophie had qualified in Germany as a teacher in 1933, the year that Hitler came to power. As a Jew, she had been blocked from work in the state system, so she went to teach at Landschulheim Caputh. Founded as a children's holiday home by Gertrude Feiertag, who was to be murdered in Auschwitz, the home had developed into a school for Jewish and anti-Nazi children excluded from the state sector. There Sophie could apply her progressive ideas among a team of gifted colleagues, which included Hilde Jarecki, then working as a housemother. At that time, I was a nine-year-old at the school. In later years, whenever Caputh pupils met, we would talk about it as our lost paradise amid the Nazi horror.

We children enjoyed security and adventurous discovery. Sophie taught a primary class in all subjects, including gardening, plus English and geography for older children, and, in the evening, English for her colleagues. In 1937 she transferred to Wilznacher Jewish secondary school, in the Moabit district of Berlin, founded in 1936, where she taught English, German, history and drama. Both schools were doomed to end in the violence of Kristallnacht.

In 1993, at a Berlin conference on exile studies, Hildegard Feidel-Merz read Sophie's text about Caputh. A year later, at Potsdam University and the launch of a book to which she contributed, Sophie and Hilde, surviving Landschulheim Caputh colleagues and former pupils celebrated that desecrated oasis of peace from where, on Kristallnacht, we children had fled through the woods to Potsdam and Berlin. Sophie also contributed to a seminar and exhibition about Wilznacher, leading discussions with teachers and student-teachers. She rejoiced in meeting a new German generation of likeminded professionals.

Sophie, the daughter of teachers, was born in Hamburg, the fourth child and only daughter among five children in a cultured Jewish, loving and liberal family. In 1906, when she was one year old, her family moved to Berlin. They stayed through the hardships of the first world war and on into the Weimar Republic and a period of optimism and social reform.

Sophie attended good schools and spent a few months in England living with relatives - the Gaster family, an invaluable experience - and then read education, English, drama and geography at Berlin University. She and her brothers, having realised how privileged they were, had gravitated towards the left. Consequently, as she observed, she "found it easy not only to share material but also spiritual goods".

She did her teaching practice in her father's school, the Karl Marx schule in Neuköln, Berlin - famous for progressive "reform" education. And, as she said, she "found her own ways to somehow cope with the situation of Jews in Hitler's Germany". In September 1938 she emigrated to England. She started her life as a refugee with relatives, and then with the famous educationists, the Palmers, in Liverpool, who offered her hospitality and a job in their household - the only work permitted for refugees in 1939. The family saved one of Sophie's Caputh children and the child's parents. Sophie's parents perished in the Holocaust in 1942. Her brothers reached Palestine.

After Dovercourt and the Kindertransport, and with the outbreak of war, Sophie moved to London and the blitz. She worked on translations, taught English to refugees and met up again with Hilde. The two shared a post in a private girls' boarding school, evacuated to Morcott in Wales.

In 1942 a member of Birmingham's Jewish refugee committee - and father of a Caputh helper - recommended Sophie and Hilde to run a hostel for 14- to 18-year-old refugee girls. What they developed was a family home where life skills could be learned; housework, cooking, gardening, plus acting, arts, crafts, writing - and preparing birthday and Jewish festival celebrations. Then, from 1943 until 1955, the two friends continued this work in a hostel in Reading for five to 16-year-olds.

When the hostel closed, Sophie and Hilde settled down in Mill Hill, north London. Sophie taught English as a foreign language to adults and, from 1956 until 1970, worked at Orange Hill girls' grammar school. She taught geography and, as at Caputh, gardening. She led the Jewish morning assembly and learnt about the traditional English education system. Hilde, meanwhile, initiated playgroups, helping create a network supporting 300 inner-London groups.

In 1970 Sophie retired and developed her painting and sculpture, her studies in Hebrew and her reading and writing. She described her experiences as a teacher in Erinnerungen einer Judischen Lehrerin in Berlin und im Exil, 1983-1987 (Memories of a Jewish Teacher in Berlin and Exile), which was subtitled, Most I have Learned from my Pupils. Her autobiography, Sophie und Hilde Ein Zwillingsbuch (Sophie and Hilde, a Twinbook) was published in Germany in 1996 and later translated into English. Sophie also translated Hilde's Playgroups, a Practical Approach (1976) into German for publication this year.

Sophie and Hilde continued to travel, seeing family and friends in Israel and in the United States, and corresponded with people worldwide. Many of the children she had taught in Nazi Germany, and cared for in England, never fell out of touch.

As for me, it was in the 1960s that I met her again. She had a gift for friendship, and more and more former pupils and colleagues from Nazi Germany, and those she had cared for in England, now scattered worldwide, re-established contact. Only death has diminished that extended family. Sophie delighted at every letter, phone call and visit, and there was always a warm welcome in her home. Interest in Caputh never went away. From 2001 to 2003, Sophie and her colleagues and former pupils were interviewed for Radio Berlin. The resulting prize-winning programme has been repeatedly broadcast in German-speaking Europe.

Sophie was a vegetarian. In her youth she went rambling, swimming and dancing. In later years she went walking and used the Alexander technique. After a stroke in 2002, her eyesight failed but she never complained. She composed verses - following a family tradition "to keep her mind active" - and continued to give advice and support to her friends of all ages, including her loving carers.

In those times I would read to her in German, French and English. A former Birmingham hostel friend joined us to sing German folksongs, of which Sophie's incredible memory would recall every word. Her 100th birthday was celebrated with friends and family who came from all over the world. Humane, strong, optimistic and witty, a loving friend, she will be deeply missed.

She is survived by a near-adoptive son and numerous nephews, nieces, great-nephews and great-nieces.

· Sophie Friedländer, teacher, born January 17 1905; died February 20 2006